Given evidence of the decline of organized labor, it is not surprising that there should be pressure to reform the rules governing the representation process, the National Labor Relations Board, and American labor law in general. In recent years, there have been a series of hearings in Congress reviewing the integrity and efficacy of federal labor law. In 1984 there were hearings on the question: Has labor law failed? Evidence collected during hearings on this question concerned management practices in representation elections, the NLRB's adjudication of disputes arising out of representation elections, and the design and enforcement of current statutes relating to the representation election process. The majority report of the House Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations concluded that labor law had failed and had been “deteriorating throughout the 1970s [and] has currently reached crisis proportions” (I).

Implied, even sometimes explicitly identified in these hearings, were a couple of assumptions. First, it was assumed that reforming the regulatory environment (rules of representation elections, treatment of unfair labor practices, etc.) would substantially improve labor unions' electoral performance. Second, it was further assumed that only labor law reform could ensure the future of organized labor as an American institution. It is obvious that labor law reform was not a priority of the Reagan administration; if there had been labor law reform during this era, it would have been very hostile to the interests of organized labor.

The story of the droughts of 1972 and 1973 in Nigeria has been effectively told by Van Apeldoorn (1978a, 1981), and by others for West Africa. There were signs of trouble as early as 1969, but these were ignored – perhaps because of their patchy distribution – until a full-scale harvest failure occurred in 1972. Even this disaster was uneven in its impact. But by the end of that year, there was no doubt that the Dry Zone of West Africa was facing its worst food crisis for more than a generation. My purpose in this chapter is not to reproduce what has been done, on a more general level, elsewhere, but to examine some extensive data collected amongst drought-affected communities within the lifespan of the disaster (which may be considered to have ended, for the time being, with the rains of 1974).

THE DROUGHTS OF 1972 AND 1973

The droughts that occurred in 1972 and 1973 had major significance on all four of the dimensions – meteorological, hydrological, agricultural and ecological – defined in chapter 1. Expectations of rainfall, although not stated quantitatively in terms of the ‘normal’, nevertheless guide decisions made by indigenous land users. In the semi-arid zone, expectations are defined in terms of the growing possibilities for the major crops, and for pasture and browse. Beyond the northern limit of rain-fed agriculture (in the arid bioclimatic zone), only the second dimension is relevant.

From the perspective of adaptive response, desertification differs from drought not only in its time perspective (a long-run process as opposed to a short-run event), but also in the extent to which it can be considered as exogenous to the human system. The question of adaptation becomes subsumed in the larger one of causation. To what extent are the communities that inhabit areas prone to desertification themselves responsible for the degradation that threatens their livelihood?

It was argued in chapter 1 that a simplified definition of desertification as ‘the degradation of ecosystems in arid or semi-arid regions’ has theoretical and practical advantages. The standpoint of the present chapter is therefore ecological. Its objective is to review field evidence for ecological degradation, in relation to land use, in four of the subsystems proposed in table 1.1: the woodland, grassland, soil and morphodynamic subsystems (the hydrological subsystem was discussed in chapter 6). The evidence is ambiguous if not, in places, contradictory. Such an outcome should be expected in a complex, multivariate problem involving most aspects of the relationship between a society and its environment. Nevertheless it is only by accumulating judgements based on empirical studies that environmentalist slogans can be replaced by more balanced evaluations. This case study gives ground for questioning conventional wisdom that emphasises the role of ‘over-exploitation’ at the expense of that of meteorological drought.

Late in May 1974, the suffering caused by two successive harvest failures was at its height, and the planting rains of earlier that month had not been followed by more, causing the early millet to sprout and die in all the fields across the north of Kano State. In an unlit government rest house on the outskirts of Gumel, Cecil Woodham-Smith's The great hunger provided pretty sombre reading against a mocking background of sporadic lightning in the night sky. There is no denying that famine may hold a morbid fascination for those not called to suffer it, a fascination the more powerful for the way the subject transcends the bounds of culture and of history. There is no use in pretending a scientific detachment from the tragedies and triumphs, the greed and generosity, the degradation and the dignity in a major social disaster. Yet to further understanding, something more than committed journalism is called for. Tools of observation and enquiry, knocked up in the workshops of the social and environmental sciences, ought to help the search for system and significance.

According to a minority view, the relations between society and its environment lie at the heart of geography and form its noblest theme. A famine following in the wake of a major drought ought therefore to offer quite an opportunity. Not many responses, however, are evident. There is good enough reason for this.

THE FAT YEARS

On what kind of a world did the droughts of the early 1970s so rudely erupt? In the previous decade, the Northern Region of Nigeria (now the ‘northern states’ of the Federal Republic: figure 2.1), and also the adjacent areas of Niger Republic, reached levels of agricultural production probably unsurpassed before or since. Independence had come a decade previously, but it was an essentially unaltered colonial system of export agriculture that continued to sustain both economies. Although peasant producers, whose memories are long, were under no such illusion, delayed or inept bureaucratic responses to the drought crisis showed that stability had come to be taken for granted.

The crops and the animals

Any visitors to Kano in the 1960s could see with their own eyes that the fortunes of Northern Nigeria were built upon the groundnut. The famous storage pyramids portrayed the fruitfulness of the earth as vividly as the practical difficulties of evacuating the crop. Exports of the ‘blessed groundnut’ had grown from 50,000 tons in 1916 (six years after the arrival of the railhead at Kano) to 872,000 in 1962–63, when Nigeria was Africa's leading producer (Hogendorn, 1978: 123, 133). The groundnut-producing area lay mainly in the Dry Zone (figure 1.2) where more than half the population of the Northern Region lived, and where more than half the farmers produced groundnuts for the market.

The foregoing analysis of the nature of adaptive response to meteorological drought, and to the food shortages that have been closely associated with it in time, provokes the question of its future recurrence. To portray human communities solely as adaptors to exogenous events does not go far enough. However impressive the adaptive capabilities of such populations, the absence of any knowledge of future rainfall restricts individual choice to ad hoc decisions from year to year. This annual rhythm may obscure from view the possibility of longer-term trends, including that of ecological degradation (or desertification). Droughts are themselves contributory factors to such degradation. But so are anthropogenic factors, and increasing credence is being given to the view that land use may be linked with rainfall by means of ‘feedback’ mechanisms. For these societies, the roles of victim and agent are not easily distinguished. At this point, an examination of the climatological evidence is necessary, firstly as a pointer to the future significance of social adaptation, and secondly as a preliminary to a more systematic discussion of some evidence relating to desertification.

This chapter aims to review the related subjects of meteorological and hydrological drought. The most important questions concerning meteorological drought, from the standpoint of the present study, are (a) its persistence, (b) the possibilities for predicting its occurrence, and (c) the existence of feedback mechanisms.

Spatial mobility is an entrenched characteristic of West African populations, but its importance in the economic strategies of individuals and households is rarely given adequate recognition in sectoral studies. Not all mobility has economic objectives, of course. Prominent exceptions are: the periodic circulation of koranic scholars (H almajirai) and of schoolchildren; the pilgrimage to Mecca (haj; Birks, 1978); and migration for marriage (e.g. Mortimore and Wilson, 1965: 35–7). The existence of such objectives implies that a strictly economic interpretation of mobility is inadequate. However, an inescapable factor in the system is drought, whether viewed on a seasonal or an annual basis. A sudden intensification of drought, as observed from behaviour in the past, may be expected to produce corresponding changes in the intensity and characteristics of mobility.

MOBILITY IN THE CITY: KANO'S STRANGERS

The population of the old walled city (Birni) of Kano was swelled each dry season by numbers of men and boys who left their villages for a few months in order to pursue koranic study (H karatu) or practise secondary occupations (H sana'a). Such visitors had a claim, under an Islamic convention of hospitality, to sleep in an entrance hall (H zaure) of a city householder (H maigida). Shortterm mobility (cin rani) for karatu and sana'a is deeply embedded in Hausa tradition, and the destinations chosen are rural as well as urban.

The 28 recommendations of the United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNEP, 1977c; 1978) ranged far and wide amongst both technical and social aspects of global ecological degradation and drought. The heart of the Plan of Action was the introduction or extension of land-use planning on ‘ecologically sound’ principles (recommendation 2), but account was also taken of the need to recognise the ‘needs, wisdom and aspirations of the people’ (recommendation 3). Technical proposals were principally directed to the major ecological subsystems – water resources, rangelands, rain-fed agricultural areas, irrigated areas, and woodland vegetation (recommendations 5–9), and to the development of alternative energy sources (19). There was also a group of proposals aiming to monitor and improve human welfare, including the strengthening of systems of insurance against drought (recommendations 12–17). The remaining recommendations covered survey, evaluation and monitoring (1, 11), science and education (18, 20), and national and international administrative, planning and financial aspects (21–8). Discussion of these global recommendations is beyond the scope of this study, based as it is on a small part of one African bioclimatic region. However, it may be noted that considerable criticism has attended the efforts of the United Nations Environment Programme whose Desertification Branch was given responsibility for coordinating the implementation of the recommendations (Timberlake, 1986: 92–7). Financial resources have been inadequate and, so far, progress has been slow: apparently ‘the war against desertification is being lost’ (Walls, 1984).